


Say Goodbye

by isthisenoughorcanwegohigher



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: because why the hell not, loosely tied into NBC's revolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-05 06:31:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18823054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthisenoughorcanwegohigher/pseuds/isthisenoughorcanwegohigher
Summary: Jorge never had the chance to have a closing with his biological son. When the Flare hits, for all intents and purposes, he adopts Brenda. She becomes the family he lost, and he will do anything to keep her safe. Every risk they take feels like a premature goodbye. He just never realized that Brenda wasn't the one he should be saying goodbye to.





	Say Goodbye

Jorge had always wanted to be a father. Before the Flare had destroyed everything dear to him, he’d even had a family. A small one, and a young one. His wife had just given birth to their first son, Jason.

He remembered getting the call, his office line ringing, and how he’d almost tripped on the way to his boss’s desk to explain that his wife had gone into labor and he needed to go to the hospital. Accounting could wait. His son was on the way.

He didn’t remember the drive to the hospital, or the hours Julia spent in labor. He was sure he’d felt that his hand (and his ears) would never recover from Julia’s labor induced fury.

A lot about that day was fuzzy. But Jorge did remember how his breath was stolen away when the nurse placed Jason, wrapped tightly in a yellow blanket, into his arms.

Jorge was sure in that moment that there would be nothing that could ever top the joy he felt. No birthday or graduation or holiday celebration would ever make him smile so painfully wide. Jason was his son, and he was perfect.

His white picket fence life lasted three weeks.

Week one was spent nearly sleepless, dealing with an exhausted wife who swore she was never leaving the bed again, and a screaming infant who seemed set on never letting his parents get any rest. Jorge wasn’t big on the news, but he still liked to be up to date. Running on the anxiety of keeping an infant alive and no sleep, Jorge missed the article buried in the middle of the paper, a rumor that the new little branch of the CDC had fucked up with human trials and was under fire for endangerment.

Week two was easier. Jason slept a little more soundly, and Julia was back on her feet. Her parents came out to visit their first grandchild. Life was picture perfect, wonderful. It was easy to ignore the whispers and news reports about a deadly new virus when Jorge had a sparkle in his eye and a smile that he couldn’t shake.

Week three, it was more difficult to ignore the news and the scare of the virus that WCKD had been testing when it was practically on his doorstep. Still, what the news was calling the Flare would burn out soon enough. Huddled into the couch with Julia at his side and Jason in his arms, watching people running rampant in the streets and only able to pray that no harm came to his family–for what could an accountant do against a swarm of sick people?–it was all to easy to miss the warnings of solar flares that could cause unforeseen damage. As news cycles go, the dominating story buried the unimportant one.

There was no week four. The Flare, it seemed, was passed on through contact of bodily fluids. No one was saying it, and yet the word was passed from person to person–Crank. No one wanted to say zombie. These people weren’t dead, they were just sick. Very sick. Julia, desperate to get out of the house, had gone to the grocery store to pick up essentials. She’d returned home with teeth marks in her forearm and a scabbed over wound on her temple.

“You need to go.” She’d said it as casually as she would say, “We’re out of milk.”

“What?”

“You need to go,” she repeated, and like that, Jorge’s perfect world came crashing down around him.

Julia refused to endanger the baby, and their neighborhood was getting more dangerous. So Jorge packed what he could carry and left with Jason.

Days later, camping out under an overpass, the solar flares hit. The world burned. The world changed overnight.

Jorge found himself at a WCKD compound that ran too efficiently to have been set up last minute, but with Jason running a high fever and unable to keep anything down, that was the last thing on Jorge’s mind.                                   

* * *

 

Years later, Jorge found himself doing exactly what he’d done then–fighting against fate with nothing but his wits, a gun or two, and his desperate need to protect the children he’d taken under his wing. He wouldn’t fail them, not like he’d failed Jason.

As he swerved across the overgrown brush away from the train, basking in the miracle that was dodging small missiles aimed at a stripped down truck, Brenda laughing in the passenger seat, Jorge felt a brief glimmer of the happiness he had when Jason was born. They were so close to accomplishing their goal and rescuing Minho. Soon, Jorge’s family would be complete again. He’d have succeeded where he failed before.                                                   

* * *

He could taste the bitter disappointment around the trio of Gladers when they realized that they’d failed to rescue Minho.

It was a small mercy that they’d managed to get Aris and Sonya back, because Harriet was smiling again. A real smile, one that she didn’t force, one that wasn’t a defensive tactic to get people off her back. But Thomas, Newt, and Frypan were dejected.

More angry, in Thomas’s case, but in the end it was all the same. The plan hadn’t worked. Minho was still within WCKD’s clutches, still trapped. And Jorge was beginning to doubt that their efforts to get him back would ever pan out. If it did, he was starting to wonder if it would be worth what they lost.

Vince, at least, felt the same way. That was a small mercy. He wouldn’t be the only disapproving adult about Thomas’s desperation to save Minho. But small mercies, Jorge knew, wouldn’t stop the actions of kids who had been drafted into a war they couldn’t even remember being a part of. Small mercies wouldn’t help someone sleep at night when the dark brought on haunting visions of what could be happening to someone you loved.

Small mercies didn’t stop kids from crashing cars in tunnels infested with Cranks.                                                     

* * *

“I get the feeling that if I walk out that door, I’m never going to see you again.” The words fell from his mouth, ominous and dark, before he could stop them.

Brenda just scoffed, an easy smile on her face. “Just don’t be late.”

Right. Get to the base and back to the Last City on a Berg that would probably be running on fumes. Easy. Certainly easier than breaking into WCKD headquarters and rescuing 28 kids.

The thought that lingered as Jorge started the Jeep and tore away from the outskirts of the city wasn’t his fear of never seeing Brenda again, but the notion that the number of kids they were going to attempt to rescue was, before the Flare, what an average class size would have been.

His thoughts jumped between Jason and Brenda as he drove. If Jason had lived past his first birthday, Jorge was confident that he and Brenda would have been a lot alike.                                                   

* * *

Small mercies, it turned out, also didn’t stop Vince from groaning when Jorge showed up sans kids, Berg key in hand, ready to fly back to the Last City.

They didn’t stop an all out war between WCKD officials and Cranks intent on burning the glittering, prestigious city to the ground.

They didn’t stop the pressing worry from eating at him until Vince finally shoved him away from the controls, muttering something about distracted driving.

The aching fear that he would return to find Brenda amongst the crowd–black veins crawling and pulsing up her face, blood trickling from her lips, face inhumanly dark with the fury only Cranks could feel–it smothered him until the moment the Berg opened and she was there, face bright with anxiety, shepherding kids into their seats.

The Gladers weren’t back yet, and it was the smothering fear of Brenda with inky black lines protruding from her skin that rooted him in place, insisting they go.

Small mercies didn’t stop Brenda from being as stubborn and protective as he once had been, refusing to leave anyone behind.

They didn’t stop Teresa’s voice, carried along by the waves of heat from fires raging all around them, from uprooting everything he’d thought he’d known.                                                     

* * *

It was Vince who decided they should go after the kids, and it was Vince who finally managed to get them to pull themselves together enough to get back to the Berg.

They had to get Thomas back from WCKD now, and somehow that managed to be all that mattered, all that took root in the minds of those left standing.

It was Jorge who was left behind, still standing, looking over the broken body of Newt. His face, slack with the vacant expression only death could bring, covered in black veins, blood drying on his chin, lacking the one thing common on the corpses of those who died from the Flare–fury. Newt hadn’t died angry, he’d died scared.

Jorge couldn’t blame him. Small mercies, at least, proved that for good people, death would return the favor. Death had been good to Newt. He hadn’t died slowly, he’d died fast and relatively painless.

A time would come, later, when Jorge would be able to remove the dagger from Newt’s chest, but for now, another small mercy–he swallowed down the despair with the bile that rose in his throat as he picked up the body of a kid he’d come to consider a surrogate son.

He hadn’t even acknowledged how he felt about Newt until the moment he held the kid’s body in his arms. He’d seemed tall in life, full of anger and quick, sarcastic retorts, full of fear and resentment and regret and hope and love, and yet he was small and light in Jorge’s grip.

Pausing a moment to shift the body, he noticed the eyes were still open, dull and staring. Jorge sank to the ground so he wouldn’t drop the kid, and he closed his eyes, exhaling shakily.

For so long he’d been distant, afraid of losing Brenda after Jason, that he hadn’t ever stopped to admit he cared for the Gladers, and now it was too late.  
  
Newt was gone. Thomas was probably going the same way. And he’d walked out that door without saying goodbye.


End file.
